Fri 10 Aug |
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I was having a look around for an easy way to find the numeric character reference codes "&#number;" html notation and found a number of really good resources. I know you can simply type the character if you have a European keyboard as so - ? ? ? - etc but this will not validate and can cause big problems on computers using a different character set. This can lead to the user seeing Li?ge or an even stranger rendering. 
So its good practise to either use the character entity reference (&name;) or the numeric character reference (&#number;). There's a quick reference to character entities here. Numeric character references can specify any character where as character entity is limited to a subset of Unicode characters. In Dreamweaver you can choose to have all characters that cannot be typed in the document's character encoding converted to character entity (&***;) form. That is set in the Preferences.. => Code Rewriting. I haven't found a way for it to produce Numeric character references but I did read somewhere that it may be possible to edit the XML template or get an extension. ***edit*** You can modify the Insert=>HTML=>Special Characters list by modifying the .htm docs for each character. They are found at C:\Programs\Dreamweaver\Dreamweaver 8\Configuration\Objects\Characters. How to modify the Insert=>HTML=>Special Characters=>Other... which is actually characters.js found in the same folder, I can't find anywhere. ***edit*** If you set your Content-Type to Unicode as opposed to Western European the auto replacement doesn't seem to work so cut and paste will be necessary. So on to the resources... The online character database by Indrek Hein at the Institute of the Estonian Language is just about all you need with lots of form boxes to make your inquiries. You can select to list all the special characters required for a specific language, look up just one character or have them returned in decimal or hexadecimal. For html compatibility decimal is the one to use. FileFormat is very easy to use as long as you know a  is a Latin capital letter A with a circumflex because to find the coding you browse through an alphabetical list. Another list site is Die Unicode-Datenbank. This is in German but you can browse through the categories by looking for the actual symbol. Zvon.org is another searchable database but only seems to return hexadecimal values that you can then convert to decimal notation. There's also a short cut-n-paste list here for the the more common symbols and letters. Edit 8-7-2007 Another good cut-n-paste here |
| Last Updated on Tuesday, 10 March 2009 10:32 |